Another edition of a Wuthering Expectations staple: “Get these books back to the library.”
***
Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1933), his
first novel, about a wave of mid-17th century Jewish millenarianism in what is
now southeastern Poland. It is a book of
extraordinary violence and cruelty. Maybe
not as openly violent as Red Cavalry or the stories of Lamed Shapiro,
but up there. The world view is at least
as bleak. The Jews of Goray are recovering
from a nightmarish round of the usual warfare of the time, so are susceptible
to the promise of a Messiah. All
tradition, all reason, is abandoned. Why
not chop up your own house and use it as firewood? Soon we will be in Jerusalem!
Although Singer describes strange, magical events in a way
that makes it hard to distinguish between the “facts” of the story and legend,
it is all plausible, as a description of religious hysteria of the time and
various other hysterias we know all too well.
The visionary central female character is exactly the person who accuses
day care workers of witchcraft.
Singer’s older brother, as I saw in Yoshe Kalb (1932)
and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936), is as strong in novelistic sociology,
but I. B. is superior in language and invention. He is rich in metaphor, like a great fantasy
writer. It is Rosh Hashanah – surely the
Messiah is coming today:
The sky, which all summer long had been as blue as the curtain of the Torah Ark, and somewhat broader and higher than usual, contracted. Now the town seemed enclosed in a dark canvas tent. The hills, which had been green and evocative of the holy land, disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth. The smoke, reluctant to leave the chimneys, spread over the houses, as though space had shrunken. (p. 180, tr. Jacob Sloan)
The landscape, the sky is full
of meaning. Of course the Messiah does
not come, leaving sixty pages for things to get even worse.
***
The Wild Geese, Mori Ōgai
(1911-3), a little novel by a writer often mentioned alongside Sōseki Natsume
as a founder of modern Japanese fiction, a subject about which I know very
little. This particular book seemed
awfully minor.
Small-time loan shark Suezō, sick
of his wife, buys a pretty young mistress, Otama. Here’s Donald Keene in Dawn to the West
(1984), the “Fiction” volume: “Otama in the course of the novel develops from a
trustful, innocent girl into a woman who discovers how to use the man who is
using her; Suezō, though a moneylender, is portrayed with surprising sympathy,
especially in the scenes with this harridan of a wife” (369). I would say yes about Otama, and her
development is by far the most interesting thing in the book; no no no about
the repellent Suezō, who is wrong about everything, ethically and otherwise,
and is fortunately abandoned around the middle of the book, which I will again
note is only 107 pages long in the Tuttle edition, so I did not suffer too much,
or, really, at all.
Mori’s prose, at least as
translated by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, is plain and distant. I don’t see anything I’m dying to quote. The last ten pages take a curious, digressive
structural turn (the narrator is nominally the author, telling a story from his
medical student days):
In a European book of children's stories, there is a tale about a peg. I can’t remember it well, but it was about a farmer’s son who got into a series of difficulties on his journey because the peg in his cartwheel kept coming out. In the story I’m telling now, a mackerel boiled in bean paste had the same effect as that peg. (107)
The last pages of the story
certainly surprised me, even if I was not surprised when the symbolic geese in
the title finally appeared.
This one gets slotted into Dolce Bellezza’s ongoing Japanese literature event.
I’m not sure why, exactly, but this story has not left me although I read it a year ago. While there was nothing to quote, as you say, the mood was extraordinary (to me). I felt such compassion for the girl whom I saw as lost and hopefully, but ultimately unfulfilled. The image of the geese flying away at the end was a surprising conclusion; what was resolved? Typical of modern Japanese literature the answer is not much.
ReplyDelete*hopeful, not hopefully
ReplyDeleteYes, a mood, especially once the novel shifts more to Otama and becomes less sordid. And yes, the only thing that is resolved is something that does not happen. But what does, then?
ReplyDeleteIt is up to us to decide. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteI don't know. Life goes on, I guess.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I forgot to mention that the novel's portrait of Tokyo is quite interesting. It's all set in neighborhoods tourists now visit.
Now I'm interested to see how Singer treats the fantasy ambiguity of the novel.
ReplyDeleteIt's a quite interesting technique. Some of the fantasy elements are just rumors (probably), but others seem to happen "on stage" - but perhaps those, too, are just being told. Then the last two chapters switch, in language and content, to an imitation of an early modern chronicle, where the expulsion of the dybbuk is taken as fact. All quite curious.
ReplyDeleteThis is the first book I read for the Japanese Literature Challenge this year. I was also a bit disappointed: https://wordsandpeace.com/2022/01/19/book-review-the-wild-geese/
ReplyDeleteAnd here are the 6 titles I have read so far: https://wordsandpeace.com/2021/12/14/japanese-literature-challenge-15/
Of the 6, my favorite is The Waiting Years, by Fumiko Enchi
Thanks for providing the links.
ReplyDeleteI guess I would not say I was disappointed, but my primary question with a new book, or sometimes even one I know, is "What is this book?" And I learned what it was, so, success, really.
The Enchi sounds interesting. Someday I will read more books from the 1950s, perhaps including that one.